


Find Light in the Beautiful Sea

by lc2l



Category: Ocean's (Movies)
Genre: Con Artists, Diamonds, F/F, Femslash, Hotel Sex, Prison, banter and make outs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 19:25:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15250350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lc2l/pseuds/lc2l
Summary: They walked out of the Met Gala with $300,000,000 of diamonds and for tonight, they've gotten away with it.The trap is set, justice is calling; but for tonight, most of the crew can rest.Debbie just has one more part of the plan to take care of.





	Find Light in the Beautiful Sea

**Author's Note:**

> I started this after seeing the movie the first time. Needless to say it got long and took more time an expected, but we made it to the finish :)
> 
> Thanks as always to [Croissantkatie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/croissantkatie) for reading, encouraging, smileyfacing. Big thanks to [Kelli](http://hold-onto-your-hearts.tumblr.com/) who found my cry for help in the wilds of tumblr, fixed all my commas and was generally fab!
> 
> Title is from Diamonds by Rihanna because there's a reference that should absolutely have made it into the movie ;)

For tonight, they’ve got away with it. Debbie smiles, raises her glass and waves off the ladies, off to hit the town or to lay low or to – apparently – hug their baby sisters. For tonight, they can coast on victory and she’ll let it sit until tomorrow before dropping the news that they haven’t got away with it just yet.

Amita winks, leaning in to pat Debbie’s arm in a way that makes it abundantly clear she is a fantastic jeweller, not a brilliant spy. “Everything went without a hitch.  _ Everything. _ ”

Lou isn’t in the crowd splitting off outside, but since it’s her house, she got the most high-stakes part of the job and she knows exactly what’s coming up next; Debbie assumes she’s passed out on the luxury Egyptian cotton sheets that she swore blind she didn’t steal from Debbie’s collection of belongings.

Deb slides the door shut, jams the lock into place and flicks on the light with her elbow. She kicked off her shoes as early as it was literally possible to do so, but still her feet are aching. She’d kill for a martini, a hot bath, and a vibrator, preferably all at the same time.

“So that went well.”

Debbie looks up. The light hangs over a scene from the Louvre, from the Sistine chapel, from European royalty itself. Lou is still wearing that dark green jumpsuit, hugging the long lines of her legs tossed carelessly across the leather sofa cushions, with that leopard print suit jacket she loves so much thrown over her shoulders.

There is a crown set with rubies sitting lopsided on her head, a bushel of diamonds draped lovingly around her neck and she’s spinning a tiara idly on one finger, the gems catching the light with a flash at every turn.

It turns out spending five years, eight months and twelve days visualising an extremely extravagant number of diamonds is not even close to a substitute for seeing them in the flesh. A lesser woman might have trouble finding words, but words are the rock on which the Oceans build their castles. “I’d like to think so,” she says, taking slow measured steps closer, stretching out her toes on the concrete floor. “Yes.”

Lou’s eyes don’t leave her face, the tiara keeps spinning around, and around. She’s wearing far more make-up than was required for her role in this and it looks damn good on her. Everything, once again, to plan. “And your secondary goals, are they on schedule?” Everything except the epic levels of judgement dripping off that voice.

Debbie is close enough that if she wanted to, she could knock the stiletto dangling decadently off Lou’s toe to the floor, if she wanted. If she felt petty enough. “The trap is set, if that’s what you mean. If you’re intending to advise me against it – again – then we’ve wasted fifteen million dollars and we’ll need a new fall guy.”

Lou sits upright in a fluid motion, legs spread like a man on a train, holding the tiara between the tips of her fingers like she knows  _ exactly _ what she’s doing. “It’s an unnecessary, reckless addition, neither of which are words I tend to associate with you.”

This was not the plan, but Debbie can’t – she can’t let this go. “You don’t understand, you still don’t –“ She’s never not finished a sentence in her life, but she can’t figure this out. There’s a chair and she takes it, dragging nails across the leather. “It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me, Lou.”

“Worse than that time in Paris, when –“

Deb catches Lou’s ankle with one foot, keeps her eyes on that, breaking rules one through three of the Ocean code.

Never get involved, never take your eyes off the prize, never look back.

In her defence, though, Danny barely touched the brakes smashing through all three. “It was the worst thing,” she says again, slower. “That has ever happened to me. The food is exactly as bad as they say, there’s not a moment’s peace until all there is is peace for weeks and weeks of bare walls and silence, the guards are exactly – exactly as bad as they say.” This was not the plan. She was going to be cool, collected, she was going to be a powerful woman sipping Margaritas and saying ‘prison, oh, well, who hasn’t in this day and age?’

She wasn’t going to look up at Lou dropping a tiara to the floor and say, “People get lost in there. I almost got lost and he –“ she brushes off the hand reaching out to her. “He’s still the darling of the art world, thinking the worst I’ve got up my sleeve is a sandpapered toothbrush and a smile.”

Lou laughs on a single exhale, falling back on the sofa to survey her, the queen of this little warehouse kingdom. There’s something in her eyes that smacks of pity, which of all things about this conversation may well be the hardest to bear. “So you make him suffer in return. An eye for an eye. And when he gets out, what, we go through this again?”

“I thought about killing him,” Debbie says, mostly just to hear how it sounds. It was top of the list for nearly a year without her ever being able to say it out loud. There was a contingency plan for it, if she couldn’t help herself. “But you know, that’s not really my style.” She’s talking back to herself, finding the familiar smile. Even when a con goes wrong, you can pull it back with just the right amount of style, panache, and angry German shouting.

Lou shakes her head. “But still, how does one pull back from that? Every time you meet someone from now on, is it going to be this constant fight between wanting to be close and hating to be vulnerable. I know you, Debs, once you think you’ve found a flaw you shut it down, completely, no space for negotiation.”

Never take your eyes off the prize. “That’s part of the plan. No more relationships with anyone I don’t completely trust. One hundred percent.”

“Well I’m forty percent sure your brother is  _ dead _ , and also that’s incest, not that I’m judging your lifestyle choices so long as Tess knows I’m here for her after.”

“Oh please, I wouldn’t trust Danny as far as I could throw him and his weirdly oversized crew.” She stands up. Technically the plan had this moment two months on when they were sipping Cosmos on a deserted island, but you learn to roll with the moments when you get them. “No, I’m thinking of someone who always has my back, goes along with my crazy schemes, tries to stop me shooting myself in the foot.”

There is something incredibly satisfying about rendering Lou Miller speechless.

Debbie stands up and steps forward, purely to put herself between Lou’s spread knees and smile. “You always told me I overcomplicate things.”

Lou is not quite an Ocean, but she’s been around Debbie long enough that she finds her feet, settling them flat on the floor and leaning forward just a little, head tilted up so their eyes meet and the tiara catches the light. Debbie could put two fingers under her chin, just to hold her there, and the thought sends tiny shiver cracks through her composure like the first touch on slightly too thin ice.

Lou stands up, and now it’s Debbie with her head tilted up a little, which her libido turns out to be entirely fine with. Lou swings the second tiara once around her fingers, then slides it into place on Debbie’s brow. “You certainly went through a whole host of unnecessary steps to get here. I believe I said something to that effect when you met our lovely scapegoat.”

Debbie touches her fingers to Lou’s waist instead, slipping them from the top of her pants up under her shirt because no one’s going to stop her now. “You said, ‘I can’t believe you’re wasting your time with him when I’m right here.’”

At the time, Debbie had thought she was joking. Then Lou had all but vanished from her life the whole time Claude was in the picture and Debbie had thought she was jealous of the partnership, of Deb finding someone else to commit crimes with.

Debbie’s entire job revolves around reading people and knowing what they want. Three years in prison she sat up in the middle of the night in her tiny solitary box. ‘That wasn’t what she was jealous of.’

“And was I right?”

“You were right.” Debbie tilts her head back, blinks her eyelashes like she’s alone with a mark. “How about we make up some time?”

Lou smiles a bright slash of red. “I think you need to make it up to me. I’m thinking a hotel, one of those five star penthouse deals, champagne and strawberries on the balcony and a king size bed with Luxury sheets.”

This feels like walking a fine line between success and haste, like the best kind of con. “Or we could go upstairs to where you’ve co-opted my thousand threadcount Egyptian cotton.”

“I knew you had an ulterior motive.”

“Some sheets are worth having lesbian sex for.”

“Bitch,” Lou says. “You’d let me fuck you on hemp.”

Debbie is not, by nature, an honest person but looking into that red smirk, wickedly glinting eyes all set off by the light of millions of dollars in crown jewels, all she’s got is. “Yes.”

Lou’s lips part just a little and Debbie is  _ done _ , she’s on her toes, sliding a hand underneath the diamonds hanging from Lou’s ear and stealing a kiss like a work of art.

“Jesus.” Lou’s hand pulls the clip free from her hair, letting it fall loose down her back. The tiara tumbles to the floor and she doesn’t care.

They’re halfway back down onto the sofa when Debbie surfaces. “Not that I’m objecting too strenuously,” she says, in the moments of breath she can catch where Lou’s hands haven’t stopped at all. “But we do have beds upstairs, and I didn’t spend three years six months and eighteen days picturing your sofa.”

Lou leans back, eyebrows disappearing up under her hair. “Wait, do you think I’m going to put out here?” She stretches out a hand, a soft weight on Debbie’s shoulder stopping her getting closer. “Sixteen years you’ve made me wait. I should be demanding a small private island, rose petals, the works.”

“Sounds like a hassle to organise,” Debbie says, moving Lou’s hand around her waist and resting her knees either side of the sofa cushions. “When we could just walk upstairs.”

Lou’s smile spreads across her face like a Cheshire cat. “I believe I said something about a penthouse suite.”

Debbie considers her for a moment. She could push the issue. Lou is not an easy mark, but Debbie isn’t a common criminal and there’s a strong argument for  _ I want to put my mouth between your legs _ that virtually sells itself.

But Lou is looking up at her and her sarcastic smile keeps faltering into moments of awe, looking up at Debbie, like she can’t believe her luck. Debbie, honestly can’t believe that the two of them have made it to this point: alive, soon to be rich, free and single.

And if Lou looks like this in a seedy warehouse down by the river, dollar store necklaces and multimillion diamonds clinking together at her throat, Debbie’s mouth goes dry at the thought of her silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline.

Debbie turns around – always leave them wanting more – and picks up her purse from the sofa where she’d dropped it. She cards fingers through her hair, giving it some shape after hours pressed under a wig, and slides her feet painfully back into those godawful shoes.

Only then does she look back. “Well?” she says. “Let’s go.”

*

Their pockets are overflowing with diamonds but they can’t use credit cards near the warehouse without exposing its location and collectively they have a single ten dollar bill so they catch the subway uptown. Lou trades their change for the bottom of a bottle of bourbon and tilts her head back to pour it down her throat. Debbie stares at the way her throat moves, mouth dry at the thought of it, and hates every single stranger in this car stopping her from pressing Lou onto the seat and kissing her right there. “I can’t believe you’re making me wait. We could be in bed by now.”

Lou tosses the empty bottle on the floor. “We could’ve been having sex three weeks ago if not for your incredibly specific plan. What if it hadn’t worked? If you died without ever letting me lick you out, you would owe me for eternity.”

Debbie has told a thousand lies in a thousand places without so much as a blush, but Lou’s tongue flicks her lips on  _ lick you out _ and Debbie’s heart is racing. “You worry too much,” she says, building herself some solid ground to hold herself up on. “Our contingency plans had contingency plans. If the Met got hit by terrorists, we had our first kiss in a basement to the sound of gunfire. In one plan, you took Daphne Kluger to the met ball and we had to get Claude in as a waiter.”

Lou laughs, raising a single eyebrow at her. Her coat is falling open a little, revealing a slice of the jewels around her throat. “You really predicted everything?”

Not how she would look in low lighting with the glint of the diamonds catching on her skin. Not how it would feel to wait, like a thousand butterflies in every single one of her limbs and her heart racing faster at every word.

There was one eventuality where she didn’t get this. Even in prison, even knowing how much she wanted it, she couldn’t say for sure if she’d be able to stand in front of Becker in that gallery and not shove her shiv directly into his throat.

It had been a closer thing than she’d ever admit, but she managed it. Because she couldn’t bear to miss this moment. “Nineball,” she says. “I don’t think anyone could predict her.”

*

What seemed like a great idea stalking out of the warehouse rapidly deteriorates once they’re back on the street and the sky is spitting water down on them, not even considerate enough for a full on deluge, and the shoes are digging into her feet like knives and Lou keeps tapping her fingers against her leg like she’s having second thoughts.

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” Debbie says, again, walking as briskly as possible without breaking into an all-out run. Petty criminals run.

“I’m not gay, Lou,” Lou drawls. “You’re like my sister, Lou.” Her voice saunters, but her incredibly long legs are keeping pace in a not entirely suave fashion.

It’s heady, the knowledge that Debbie is  _ getting _ to her. That she’s cracked the shell and as soon as they get down this damn street she’ll be able to do a whole lot more than that. Which makes her bold, reaching out to find Lou’s hand right there on the street, sliding her fingers in between. “They say prison changes people.”

“They say,” Lou shakes her head. “Someone in there gave you an orgasm and you folded like a house of cards. Who was it?”

“No one,” Debbie lies. “It was nothing special.”

It had been something of a revelation. Debbie had gone her whole life knowing she was painfully attracted to men – usually morally bankrupt, expensively scruffy, one night at a time kind of men – and although she’d learned later in life that liking men didn’t rule out liking women, it was something she’d never really considered to apply to herself.

“Damn right it wasn’t,” Lou says, her hand possessively tight on Debbie’s fingers. “After tonight, you won’t even remember her name.”

Debbie barely remembers their names now. It was mostly fumbled after lights out, desperate for some kind of contact, closing her eyes and picturing men in shallow unsatisfactory ways then waking up in the middle of the night from dreams of them on the stand pointing at her and crying their false lying eyes out. Until that time she refused to picture anything at all, tugged the girl’s top off and rested a hand in her hair and thought  _ oh my god. _

And thirty seconds later with sparks going off behind her eyes  _ Lou is going to be such a bitch about this. _

And ten seconds after that with Lou raising an eyebrow and drawling in her brain and her orgasm kicking up into holy fucking shit territory.  _ Oh my god. _

“Promises promises.”

She’s picked literally the closest hotel it’s possible to get to and it still takes far too long to reach it. Damp in the shoulders with her hair hanging limp, she leaves Lou in the doorway to walk up to the reception desk.

Less than a minute later she’s walking back, flicking a keycard between her fingers to see the look of appreciation on Lou’s face, the low burn of potential, the excitement that’s building in the warmth that still clings to her fingers and the slight smudging of the Lou’s lipstick in the golden light.

“Can I get your bags, Ma’am?” asks a young man in a concierge uniform. Normally Debbie would never miss the approach of a stranger, but normally she wouldn’t need to focus one hundred percent of her attention on one of her own.

“No bags,” she says. “We’ll need a private elevator. Get to the kitchen and tell them to send up champagne, fruit, the works. It’s our honeymoon.”

She doesn’t stop to look if he guards the door to the elevator to stop anyone coming in, or if they just get lucky. As soon as the doors shut, she’s moving forward like a burst dam, tilting her head up into a kiss that falls like a wave. “You have no idea,” Lou breathes into the gaps between lips and tongues and Debbie’s slow quest to map the line of Lou’s neck with her breath. “How you look when you lie.”

“Good enough to get champagne from a busboy.”

Lou laughs, low and throaty and Debbie can feel the vibration through her lips. “Good enough to take whatever you want.”

The elevator rings in a distant, unimportant kind of way and they almost end up riding back down to the lobby. Lou fumbles for the door open button three times, until Debbie pushes her up against the wall and holds her palm on it so Lou’s hand can return to the more serious job of twisting up the fabric of her dress and pressing warm on her hip. Debbie has always been a dress person, but she can appreciate the value of a good suit when Lou’s thigh is free to slide between her legs, stretching the fabric out to press up. Running a line of kisses down Debbie’s exposed shoulder, smearing cold raindrops with warm lips against her skin.

Debbie’s hands are up under the jacket, pulling free the shirt underneath to get her free hand on the small of Lou’s back, the elevator blaring this constant alarm of  _ brrp brrrp brrp _ . “Call Nineball,” Debbie says, tilting her head back to give Lou more access to – there – god – “tell her to shut this lift up.”

Lou’s response is worse still. She actually breaks away, lifting her head to look around the tiny space. “No, come on. This is worse than the sofa.”

Debbie kisses her jaw, under her ear, walks fingertips up the small of her back.

“Deb, move.”

Debbie moves all of half a foot back, looks up under the eyelashes she’d ordered in especially. “Are you going to make me?”

Lou’s eyes sparkle like Debbie has honestly just handed her every painting and diamond the met has ever possessed. “We’ll get to that,” she says, like a promise she intends to keep.

*

The suite is like a thousand identical rooms Debbie has worked her way into, or been worked into in her life but there is something new to it in the way Lou steps inside, her gaze scanning around to take in the flowers, the eight assorted sofas that ninety percent of occupiers don’t even touch, the balcony overlooking the lights of the city.

Have they really never done this before? Debbie tries to picture a time, but she can’t even recall thinking of it, like why would she possibly need to take a platonic friend somewhere like this, when they could be extorting bingo halls for thousand dollar cash prizes, picnic hampers and once a bottle of homemade Sloe gin. She took Claude Becker to the platinum suite at the Monte Carlo but with Lou it was always a crate of beer, one of their apartments, movies on the sofa and takeout boxes spread over the table.

“God, I can see the whole city from up here,” Lou says from the balcony, the wind whipping her hair across her neck. “I can see the met. How long do you think it’ll take them to notice the switch?”

The Toussaint, they’ve figured out. Debbie already has a missed call from John Frazier that she’s not desperate enough to burden anyone else with tonight. As for the diamonds around Lou’s neck, they have a good three months, two days and thirteen hours before anyone examines the fakes. “I didn’t think we were here to talk business.”

The champagne made it here before them, surrounded by a platter of cheeses, fruits and tiny works of chocolate coated art. Lou walks right past it, dropping the leopard jacket from her shoulders onto the floor. She’s wearing a sheer white shirt underneath, without the cover and shadows Debbie can see the lace line of her bra underneath, the diamonds and chains hanging in and out of the buttoned down opening.

Debbie could honestly kiss her forever. Lou’s hands in her hair, lips slick as lies and her tongue keeps finding its way in over and over. Debbie rests her fingers on the back of Lou’s neck, twists them through the chains there to feel the press of diamonds against her skin and Lou’s knee working up between her thighs.

Debbie is a leader, a mastermind, she has spent three years planning this moment. She learned to ballroom dance with Danny, aged six and thirteen, both pulling in opposite directions while their teacher told them to take it in turns and they replied – virtually in unison – that Oceans don’t  _ follow _ . But now she finds herself, for once, only too happy to surrender the lead.

Lou pushes and Debbie steps back until her spine is pressed to the wall, tilts her head back against the wallpaper so Lou can kiss down her neck. She hikes her dress up a little to give better access to Lou’s hand, curving its way up her thigh.

She undoes the necklaces one handed, flicks the clasps one by one so they drop into Lou’s cleavage waiting for her to notice. It takes the diamonds dropping before she lifts her head, “Someone’s been paying too much attention to Constance.”

Debbie’s smile is a little too blissful to really cut, but solitary gives you plenty of time to come up with one-liners. “I like a girl who knows how to work her hands.”

She’s aiming for something like awe and appreciation, but she gets a snort laugh which is actually, kind of better. Lou kisses her cheek, quick and laughing, and instead of extracting the chains from her shirt, tugs the whole thing off over her head in one smooth motion.

They did not have black lace bras in solitary confinement.

They definitely did not have black lace bras with a string of diamonds caught in the centre, dripping millions of dollars in shiny trinkets down to knock gently on somehow unfamiliar skin.

Lou looks down, runs a single finger down the line of jewels, just catching the edge of one breast on the way down to her belt line. Then she looks up like she knows exactly what she’s doing. “Bedroom?”

The sheets may well be Egyptian cotton. The blankets may as well be in Egypt since Lou shoved them right down to the foot so Debbie could lie back on the pillows with Lou between her legs. Honestly, it seems to be the best place for her. If Debbie was in charge of planning, Lou would always be placed right there. With occasional breaks for crime.

Lou clips the diamonds back around her neck. No more distractions, she undoes her bra with one hand behind her back and draws it off with a soft hummed duh-duh-da duhhh. It could have been a beautiful moment but Debbie can’t hold down a laugh and get a bra clasp in the face for her trouble.

“Someone could’ve watched Constance more.”

Lou waves the clasp in her face a second longer before throwing it off onto the floor somewhere it can’t get in the way. “Someone was too distracted watching you play every single woman in that room like your own personal fiddle.” She sits up just a little, so the diamonds fall perfectly down between her breasts. It turns out there is a huge difference between catching a glimpse during a quick costume change and actually lying back with time to appreciate. “You have no idea what you look like when you’re working.”

The first rule of grifting is to know  _ exactly _ what image you’re presenting to the mark. There’s nothing in the rulebook about how you present to everyone else in the room, to the person standing next to you eyes shining.

Lou’s hands slide up Debbie’s legs, pushing her dress higher and higher, Lou’s lips curving into a smile. “When did you sneak them off?”

Debbie smiles, reaching up to touch that long smooth line of uninterrupted skin, curving a hand at her neck to pull her down close enough to kiss her jaw, blow the mark, whisper in her ear, “Who says I ever put any on?”

*

For once, she isn’t thinking of anything. Her whole body feels present, she isn’t living in the moment; she  _ is _ the moment. There’s a light crossbreeze sending shivers over her skin from the open door to the balcony, she can half see Lou standing against the skyline with a cigarette held loose between two fingers, wearing a hotel branded bathrobe like a queen.

She thinks about saying, ‘we could find another scapegoat. We could drop the diamonds and leave. We could be in the outback never to be found by morning and that would be enough for me if you were there.’

She won’t. But knowing she could say it, knowing it would be  _ true _ , is its own kind of terrifying.

She picks up the leopard print jacket from the floor on her way past, pulls it over bare skin, and steps barefoot out onto the tiles. The wind is cool, blowing her hair across her neck, picking out red marks across her shoulders and thighs that she’ll worry about hiding in the morning. Or not worry about at all.

She takes the cigarette for something to do with her hands. It tastes just as foul as before prison, but there’s something about how the smoke catches in the air.

Words are the rocks on which Oceans build their castles, but there’s a space in her mind where they should be. Everything she had prepared is too glib, when she isn’t quite ready to lose the moment. Everything she’s thinking is too honest, opening her heart for a thief to take their pick.

Lou takes the cigarette back and kisses her cheek on the way past. Small, soft, familiar but accompanied by a touch of her hand on Debbie’s waist, a slight turned in possessiveness that wasn’t there before. “How did that compare to your first time?”

Debbie turns into her, tucked between her arm and the railing. Down below, the city glitters like scattered Christmas lights all the way to the edge of the horizon. “There’s lots of first times,” she says. “The first time when I closed my eyes and pictured an ex boyfriend. The first time I didn’t try to pretend anything at all.” Looking straight down at the street below there are figures smaller than lego people running between streetlights. Debbie’s never been scared of falling, but this feels too far too fast and her heart is beating with it. “There’s the first time I closed my eyes and pictured you.”

Lou flicks the cigarette off over the balcony and they watch the tiny flare spin and go out.

“It wasn’t traumatic,” Debbie says to the railing and the city and twenty million strangers. “It’s not like anyone forced me. It was a long time to be lonely. Prison – it’s boring. But somehow it’s boring in a way that’s also the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.” She drums her fingers on the railing, trying to remember to think before she speaks. Like this is a con, except she’d never talk like this in a con.

There’s no script for this. She had three years to practice and she never figured this out. She pulls away from the city, from the arm around her. “I didn’t do anything I didn’t want. It’s just, you know.” She’s moving fast to keep ahead of Lou turning after her, stepping back inside and picking up the champagne like that’s what she intended all along. Speaking in a rush like ripping off a band aid. “It should’ve been you.”

Lou’s hand is on hers and she’s shaking. Or Debbie is shaking. The crystal flute shivers in the air. “You’re damn right it should’ve been me.”

Debbie turns and kisses her. Desperate, eyes closed, stopping whatever else either of them could’ve made the mistake of saying. She fumbles the bottle and glasses onto the table behind her, Lou’s fingers interlaced with hers, and then knocks them to the floor anyway sitting up on the edge so Lou can step back in between her knees.

Lou moves away for a moment, and then there’s a touch of something else on Debbie’s lips, something cool and sweet and she bites down on strawberry and chocolate, opening her eyes just a little to watch Lou finish it off, tongue running over it once before biting down.

It sends a whole host of desires through Debbie’s entire body, but it’s not like she can go around admitting it. “I see we’ve reached the honeymoon cliché part of the evening.”

“Oh Darlin’,” Lou drawls, fingertips crawling up Debbie’s leg, incidentally nudging the jacket so it falls open around her. “I’ve got to start treatin’ you right or your brother’s going to break cover purely to give me the Lecture.”

Debbie should’ve eaten at the gala. Her stomach feels twisted and empty, and she hasn’t slept a full night since her parole hearing. Which ten minutes ago didn’t matter, but now it’s hitting her like a gravestone. She holds it in for a moment, on a lifetime of instincts.

And then she squeezes her fingers interlaced with Lou’s on the table and lets it go, lets her head fall forward onto Lou’s shoulder and breathes in the smell of kebabs and falafel that’s still clinging onto her hair. “I’m sixty five percent sure he’s dead.”

Lou’s hand leaves her thigh to card through her hair, digging against her scalp in a way that makes her bite down on a moan. “What would get you to a hundred?”

Debbie breathes against Lou’s neck, glad to have a moment to rest and close her eyes for a second. “If he didn’t come to my wedding.”

“Wow,” Lou says, pretending to be affronted without making any move to stop holding Debbie up. “Is this part of your hundreds of levels of contingency plans? I thought you’d planned the con, not the entire rest of both our lives.”

Debbie slides her fingers under the join of the hotel bathrobe Lou is wearing, to feel her slight flinch as Debbie’s cold fingers meet warm skin. “I thought you liked me,” she says, right on the edge of teasing.

“Whatever gave you that impression? Lou says, haughty tone rendered breathless as Debbie runs her slowly warming fingertips up to curve around her breast. “I’m just hoping that if you start sleeping in my bed, I won’t have to give back your sheets.”

Debbie laughs and pulls the knotted belt cord loose from the inside. It comes open and Lou steps closer in between her legs, reaching between her thighs with one hand and picking up another strawberry with the other. There’s no urgency now. It’s a slow heat, gently rubbing pulling her mind away from the discomfort of the table and the odd breeze through the open door.

Sweet fruit and bitter chocolate and warm lips on her face, her neck, working their way down. Lou bringing her to the edge and holding her there for an agonising age to pour a glass of champagne and drink it, head tilted back to show the pulsing swallows of her throat.

And then her tongue sweet in Debbie’s mouth, on her stomach, inside her again and again.

 

*

They fumble to the floor at some point, despite there being a perfectly functional bed not ten feet away. Debbie has her head on Lou’s shoulder, she’s absently stroking Lou down but in a lazy, half asleep way. She keeps almost drifting off, then being hit by her usual instincts to never sleep when she’s not alone, then remembering that it’s Lou and feeling warm and safe and wide awake for a minute until the exhaustion hits again.

It’s a cycle she’ll get over. Someday.

“Before the con,” Lou says. “You were hardly forty percent sure Danny was dead. What changed?”

She and Danny used to share bunkbeds as children. Even now, she could sleep with him snoring in the room without a second thought. They spent three years on a crime spree through Europe before agreeing it was about time they learn to work with other people. It worked out, in the end. He found Rusty, then Tess. She found Lou.

It was always Lou.

“We took Yen,” she says. “And he didn’t immediately show up to gloat about me not even being able to make a team without him.”

Lou laughs, in a soft way that doesn’t jostle Debbie awake. “I knew there was a reason you let a man in.”

“Well if you hadn’t kept suggesting ex-girlfriends.”

“I’m not going to apologise for the fact that I have slept with every person I know who can tie their legs in a knot behind their head. I’d say that one day your path will also lead you to circus ladies, but I’m already wildly jealous of some prison women I’ll never meet so we should keep the list as short as possible.”

Debbie smiles in spite of herself, kisses Lou’s neck because it’s right there and she can. “You get wildly jealous over me?”

She can’t look up, but she can hear the smile in Lou’s voice, feel it in the way her fingers run through Debbie’s hair. “Constantly,” Lou says. “I know what it looks like when you’re conning me, and every time I see you doing it to someone else I want to be in their shoes just to watch you.”

“I could yell at you angrily in German.”

Lou kisses her shoulder. “That boy on the front desk downstairs when you got us up here. He was so wide eyed, I wanted to know what you were saying to him.”

Debbie laughs, sitting up so that she can take in Lou’s full face. “I said, ‘I’m Debbie Ocean, here is my credit card, give me your finest penthouse suite.’”

It is worth the $30,000 price of admission. Lou’s eyes go the size of some of their larger diamonds, her lips parted like an invitation.

Debbie picks up a strawberry from the bowl dragged down here with them and waits for her to find her voice. The fruit is soft and sweet and may well remind her of this night for the rest of her life. She finds she’s completely okay with that.

“You – you are  _ Deborah Ocean, _ ” Lou manages eventually. “You haven’t paid for a hotel room in your  _ life. _ ”

Debbie pulls her up too. At some point soon they’ll need to make it to the bed, but she’s not past the point of exhaustion yet and there’s half a bottle of champagne to get them through another few rounds if Lou keeps looking at her like she’s all the diamonds in the Met vaults combined. “I hadn’t,” she clarifies. “But I’m about to come into a fairly large sum of money, and sometimes a con is too slow.”

Lou swears, fast and beautiful, and wraps Debbie in to kiss her again.

 

***

It’s three months later when the exhibit ends, the jewels are taken down and the word FAKE leaks out all over the news.

Debbie meets John Frazier for coffee. “Oh is that what this is about?” she says, wide eyed ingénue licking salt crystals off her fingertips. “Well gosh, I’m afraid I really can’t help you there. I haven’t set foot in the Met since the Gala, so I certainly could not have been involved, but wow. Two thefts in one exhibit, that just seems so… careless.”

John Frazier’s ears could honestly start giving off steam. “Two thefts, one of which we both know you had a hand in.”

Debbie opens her eyes wide, placing a palm over her heart. “Are you implying that I had something to do with the Toussaint? The police have imprisoned the culprit of that crime, unless you are admitting to colluding to put an innocent man in prison.”

He stares at her like this is the worst thing he’s seen in twenty years of dealing with her family. “If you knew nothing about it,” he manages eventually, practically spitting the words through his teeth. “Then why the  _ hell _ did you think I wanted to meet with you?”

“I thought you were angling for an invite to the wedding.” She stands up and Lou melts out of the crowd, where she’d somehow managed to fade into the background in red leather pants and a slashed silver biker jacket. “We have space for John, right honey?”

Lou tugs her in for a kiss, before looking past her down at John. “Front and centre, babe.”

“You’re getting married,” John says, looking from her to Lou and back again like he’s facing a cobra and a panther and isn’t sure which one is going to strike first. “You. Debbie Ocean.”

Debbie smiles. They’ve got another two hours before they’re meeting the ladies at Nine Ball’s bar and only about fifty things to steal between now and then.

And there’s always more time after that.

“Naturally,” Debbie says, wrapping her arm around Lou’s wrist. Her conwoman smile is cracking with the laugh bubbling up underneath but she’s a consummate professional with Lou’s fingers tapping against her ass with a promise. “You should’ve seen the engagement ring,” she says. “Now those were diamonds.”

She turns before her laughter can shatter the illusion. Lou’s arm slings across her shoulders and they walk out together into the city.

 


End file.
